Michael Le Page

speaker

580 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3d ago

Michael Le Page’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The World, the Universe and Us · Breakthrough Synthetic Cell Has Just Reproduced - But Is It Alive? · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

And I think they started with sort of 900 genes and got them down to 400 and something.

This is working the other way around.

So Kate Adarmala has taken sort of just a few genes from bacteria.

There are a couple of viral genes.

There's also a jellyfish gene.

That's so you can see it fluoresce and you can actually see it.

You always need to have a jellyfish gene in these experiments.

GFP, the famous glowing jellyfish gene.

And so she's taken these and put them together to create this cell.

it's not quite a living cell it sort of doesn't do any of the things it does very well and it needs a lot of help doing them but it's still you know it's a momentous sort of breakthrough really because no one's got this far before this is way more than other people have achieved the synthetic biology field has been ticking along for a while and Craig Venter obviously did that work the difference here is that rather than knocking things out we're actually building it from the start up

Yes.

So these genes were taken from other bacteria and then sort of put on these artificial pieces of DNA.

And to rev it up, what the team did, they sort of the genes, the 36 genes are divided between seven pieces of DNA.

So they made loads of copies of these and they put them in solution along with all the other sort of chemicals that these cells would need.

And then they also added to the solution these sort of fatty molecules that will spontaneously form these cell-like bubbles.

So as these bubbles form, some of them would include the DNA in them.

And, you know, a few of them had all of the necessary genes to start copying their DNA and growing and so on.

So once they sort of revved them up by creating, getting these bubbles to form in solution, these bacterial genes inside them kicked in and they started copying DNA.

They also started making some proteins.

But it's important to say, you know, this is all dependent on lots of nutrients being supplied from the outside.

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